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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The American-led military coalition in Afghanistan backed off Tuesday from its claim that Taliban attacks dropped off in 2012, tacitly acknowledging a hole in its widely repeated argument that violence is easing and that the insurgency is in steep decline. In response to Associated Press inquiries about its latest series of statistics on security in Afghanistan, the coalition command in Kabul said it had erred in reporting a 7 percent decline in attacks. In fact there was no decline at all, officials said. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who is among the senior officials who had publicly repeated the assertion of an encouraging drop-off in Taliban attacks last year, was disturbed to learn of the error, said his spokesman, George Little. "This particular set of metrics doesn't tell the full story of progress against the Taliban, of course, but it's unhelpful to have inaccurate information in our systems," Little said. A coalition spokesman, J...

Black Chamber of Commerce CEO on Obama: 'I had hopes because he was black, shame on me' National Black Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Harry C. Alford told The Daily Caller that he "ignored" President Obama's "spread the wealth" comment in 2008 and "had hopes" for him "because he was black." "I don't really support him too well and he knows it and that's a badge of honor. He's bad. He's bad and I supported him. I voted for him the first time around. I had hopes because he was black. Shame on me," Alford told TheDC at the National Press Club after an anti-gun control news conference. While running for president in 2008, Obama said, "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." When reminded Obama's comment, Alford said, "I kind of ignored it. I said, 'well, maybe he's just talking.' He was serious. He was real serious and it is truly — if you rea...

University of British Columbia and Berkeley researchers have used a sophisticated new computer system to quickly reconstruct protolanguages -- the rudimentary ancient tongues from which modern languages evolved. The results, which are 85 per cent accurate when compared to the painstaking manual reconstructions performed by linguists, will be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . "We're hopeful our tool will revolutionize historical linguistics much the same way that statistical analysis and computer power revolutionized the study of evolutionary biology," says UBC Assistant Prof. of Statistics Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, lead author of the study. "And while our system won't replace the nuanced work of skilled linguists, it could prove valuable by enabling them to increase the number of modern languages they use as the basis for their reconstructions." Protolanguages are reconstructed by grouping words with common...